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Lynn Rohrer's Weblog

Cheap arrays with COMSTAR and your spare servers

We've been talking a lot lately about Open Storage... and how open source software and industry standard hardware can dramatically lower the cost of storage.

The latest entry in this Open Storage category is a cool project that just became available with the latest OpenSolaris community build -- COMSTAR, the Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target. Although it's full name sounds a little geeky COMSTAR lets you take a spare x86 server running OpenSolaris and create a cheap general purpose storage array. An Open Storage array.

Here's a little history on COMSTAR...

The prototype started in the spring of 2007 with the OpenSolaris project page showing up in July 2007. Sumit led the implementation and John
(shown here talking about iSCSI management) worked on the management aspects of the project.

While the framework has been developed by Sun engineers the port providers are being contributed by QLogic, Emulex and LSI. Here's a good illustration of the COMSTAR architecture.